1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a flat panel display device such as an organic electroluminescence device, a liquid crystal display device, or a field emission display (FED). Further, the present invention relates to a fabrication method and apparatus of the display device.
2. Discussion of the Background
Display devices such as liquid crystal display devices have been widely employed for various kinds of electronic appliances due to characteristics of such devices, such as compact size, thin shape, low electric power consumption, and lightweight design. Driving circuits or thin film transistors used for driving liquid crystal display devices are generally fabricated using an exposure apparatus, or so-called stepper.
It has been proposed to develop liquid crystal display devices that are large in size; however, after the eighth generation of such display devices of increasing size, the size growth reaches towards an ultimate extent that no technique can deal with further size growth requirements along conventional scale-up techniques in terms of the fabrication cost, apparatus transportation restrictions, and the like. Thus, there are many challenging problems facing a further increase in the size of such liquid crystal display devices. Further, in order to save fabrication costs, in addition to improvements in the efficiency by size growth of substrates, there are problems of reduction in cost of apparatuses, reduction in running costs, and improvements of yield of large scale panels.
Furthermore, recently manufacturers have now begun to market organic electroluminescence (EL) and field emission displays, and, with respect to the fabrication of such next generation display devices, reduction in the cost of the apparatus and reduction in the running cost are also challenging problems.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,929,961 (Japanese Patent No. 3698749) describes a method for fabricating liquid crystal display devices in a rolling manner as a countermeasure for saving apparatus costs and running costs for fabricating liquid crystal display devices. In examples described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,929,961 (Japanese Patent No. 3698749), a method for easily fabricating passive type liquid crystal cells is described; however, as will be discussed below, the method is not for fabricating a display system having a high-precision driving circuit or thin film transistor, which is presently used, and therefore a need exists for improvement of such methods.